


the blood of the covenant

by avid_author_activist



Category: Ranger's Apprentice - John Flanagan
Genre: Fluff, Found Family, Gen, dad gives halt a hug, halt gets a dad, i think that's all we need in life right now
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-02
Updated: 2020-07-02
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:54:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25027291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/avid_author_activist/pseuds/avid_author_activist
Summary: (is thicker than the water of the womb)Halt left his blood family behind him in the past, reaches for the name Arratay before O'Carrick. But that doesn't mean he doesn't have a family—one forged in the crucible of duty, grief, and happiness.
Relationships: Caitlyn O'Carrick & Halt O'Carrick, Halt O'Carrick & Pritchard
Comments: 13
Kudos: 52





	the blood of the covenant

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aleanmeanaquamarine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aleanmeanaquamarine/gifts).



> THIS IS FOR ELIZA, WHO IS A MARVELOUS HUMAN BEING AND WHOSE PROMPT SAID "FOUND FAMILY" SO HERE YOU GO

Halt had never really had a father. 

Not by blood, anyway. The man who married his mother was more interested in being a king than a parent. Halt knew him as a distant figure on a throne, an effigy carved from granite. When he looked back on his childhood, he remembered empty stone halls, harried tutors, a distressed mother and a distant father. But for one exception.

There were fleeting, stolen hours of freedom. Of learning to ride, track, and hunt. Of learning listen rather than hear, observe rather than see. And they began with the day a man appeared on a cliff by the ocean. 

This cliff Halt had discovered exploring at the age of nine. It was weathered, storm-beaten, and worn, but always steady under his feet. For the last five years, he had not yet seen another person on his cliff. It had always been just boy (small and closed-off), sky (wide-open, like the prairies near Dun Kilty), and sea (always roaring, never speaking), and that was the way Halt liked it.

But on this day, a stranger did appear.

The new person was a man, small in stature but still taller than Halt—most people were, after all—with white hair and beard. Halt’s first impression of his face was like that of the cliff: worn and weary, and yet infinitely calm.

“Your Highness,” he said with a nod. 

Halt stopped, taken aback. He was wearing a homespun cloak borrowed from one of the servants, and he’d left behind the insignia of the heir apparent. How did the stranger know? 

“You aren’t a commoner,” said the man, answering his unspoken question, “by the quality of your boots and the trail you came from.” He pointed to the path under Halt’s feet. “That leads to the castle grounds.” 

Halt found his voice again. “That… doesn’t mean I’m royal.”

The stranger shrugged. “Sure. But I hear the people talk about their two princes. The younger is amiable, friendly—or so says the gossip mill—and the elder sneaks away from the castle at any given chance.” He levelled a look at Halt. “There cannot be too many wayward nobles lurking in the woods, unless that is a Hibernian tradition?”

“I… no,” Halt admitted. “You’re right. I’m crown prince of Clonmel.”

The man nodded, a satisfied expression on his face. “I thought you might be.” 

His voice had some sort of fatherly quality to it: there was no other way to describe it, Halt thought. He studied the stranger with greater interest now. He had no sword, but he carried a huge longbow and a bristling quiver of arrows. And his accent wasn’t Hibernian—it was Araluan. Halt tried to analyze him, put the pieces together like the man had done with him. “Are you a—a travelling woodsman, of some sort?”

The man chuckled. “You could say that. My name is Pritchard,” he added. “I’m from Araluen. I was exiled, in fact, from Araluen.”

Halt took a step back, suddenly wary. He’d grown up watching his father sentence criminals. Exile was reserved for those who had committed treason—or murder.

Pritchard smiled at his reaction. It was a sad smile, Halt thought, the kind that carried regret and grief in equal measure. “I can’t fault you for that. I  _ can _ assure you that I was entirely innocent—but it’s up to you whether to believe me.” 

“What… were you accused of?” Halt asked tentatively.

“Treason. As if I would ever betray my country.” Pritchard’s eyes flashed, and Halt glimpsed some shard of emotion before his face went blank again, an anger at the world, held back only by huge self-restraint. 

It was that moment, somehow, that told him Pritchard ought to be trusted. “That’s awful,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Nothing much I can do about it now,” said Pritchard. “Unless I want to get myself executed. And I’m rather fond of my head.”

“You don’t… regret it, or anything?”

“You ask a lot of questions, do you?” Pritchard sat down on a nearby rock. “But, no.” He sighed. “Nothing  _ to  _ regret, because I didn’t do anything—though I am sorry I had to leave my apprentice so soon.”

The contrary part of Halt insisted that he had every right to ask questions, so he did. “You have an apprentice?” 

Pritchard raised an eyebrow. “I  _ had _ an apprentice,” he corrected. “I was banished weeks after he graduated.”

“What did you teach?”

He hesitated, as if weighing his words carefully. “The art of gathering and interpreting information. And of remaining unnoticed while you do it.” Pritchard looked directly at Halt, gray eyes inscrutable.

_ The art of gathering and interpreting information.  _ Halt felt his heart beat a little quicker. Something about that—doing the judging instead of being judged—captivated him. He felt drawn to it in a way he couldn’t explain. “I—that’s interesting,” Halt said carefully, trying not to let eagerness spill over into his expression. 

“Indeed.” Pritchard inclined his head. “I’m afraid the latter was something Crowley—yes, that was his name—” he added as Halt opened his mouth to ask another question, “was rather bad at. Crowley’s a redhead—brightest ginger you’ll ever see—and it’s quite noticeable.”

Halt felt another flare of curiosity for this former apprentice. What was Crowley like? he wondered.

But Pritchard was rising to his feet now, heading towards the edge of the forest in a direction Halt had never explored before. “Perhaps I’ll see you around, Your Highness,” he said. There was something odd about the way he walked. It was ghostlike, his passage leaving neither mark on the ground nor sound in the air. 

“Sure,” was all Halt could think to say. He stood rooted to the ground long after Pritchard had gone, still staring down at the ocean below.

<>-<>-<>

In the weeks that followed, Halt was kept so busy managing the local harvest that there was no time to return to the cliff. But it lurked always in the back of his mind, a personal haven he returned to anytime he could. Along with it, however, was an omnipresent fear that he would return and see no sign of Pritchard. That perhaps the strange Araluan exile had vanished, smoke-silent and unseen. 

Halt couldn’t stand it. He tipped his chair back on two legs with a groan. The sky outside his window was pale and cloud-scudded, the ground dappled with orange leaves. It was a great day to sneak into the market or through the woods, but Halt had to finish assignments for his tutors. And as his father’s eldest son, he was expected to appear at court in the afternoons. He groaned again and let the front legs of the chair fall to the ground again with a  _ thump _ . 

There was a knock at the door. “Come in,” Halt mumbled, setting his pen down. 

It was Ferris, wearing a purple brocade with velvet trim. “Mother requests your presence,” he said loftily. 

Halt felt a flicker of annoyance tinged with nostalgia. When they were younger, he and Ferris had had a code knock they used with each other. His twin no longer deigned to use it, citing the fact that it was childish. “Don’t talk like that,” he replied, tipping his chair back again. He knew it would make Ferris mad, and that was all that mattered. “You’re not a courtier.”

Ferris’s nose was in the air. “I am a prince, and as such, good manner of speech is crucial. As  _ you _ ought to know.” He surveyed Halt’s haphazard study with an air of distaste. 

These days, Halt often felt as if he was the younger brother and not the elder. “Whatever,” he said. “Did she say why?”

“I suggest you ask her.”

“ _ I suggest you ask her _ ,” Halt mimicked as he left the study. 

The queen was not in her own rooms but in Caitlyn’s. Halt felt a tugging dread like a fishing hook in his stomach as he pushed open the door. It seemed to pulse, threatening to pull him inside out. 

“Mother?” he asked, swallowing the tugging sensation. “Is everything alright?” The shutters on the windows were closed, light coming instead from a brass lamp on the wall. 

“Caitlyn’s ill again,” his mother said, turning towards him. Her face seemed tired in the uncertain light, but she had gone gray early—from the stress of governing or her unhappy marriage or both.

“What do the physicians say?” Halt asked, crossing to his sister’s bedside. His footsteps on the carpeted stone floor echoed unnaturally loud in his ears. Caitlyn was asleep, mousy brown hair dark with sweat. As he watched, she muttered aloud and kicked out at her blankets, thrashing against the damp sheets.

“Another fever.” His mother swept the hair away from Cait’s forehead. “She’s not responding to their medicines.”

Halt nodded wordlessly, staring down at his little sister. The bed seemed to swallow her up, her dark head tiny against the vast expanse of pillow. “Is—is there anything I can do?” he asked after a moment.

The queen didn’t take her eyes off her daughter. “Hope and pray, Halt. Hope and pray.”

Caitlyn’s condition took a turn for the worse in the afternoon.

“Still not responding to anything?” Halt asked Ferris as servants hurried past them, carrying trays with food and fresh cloths to her room.

“No.” Ferris’s normally affable features were grim. “Father paid her a visit half an hour ago.”

There was no need to say it aloud—for the king to pay attention to his daughter, the situation must be dark indeed.

“–says she might not make it through the night–” Halt heard a passing maid whisper to another.

His brother started to pace again. “This isn’t good,” he said. “The court will be in disarray come morning.”

“Is court all you can think about?” hissed Halt. “When Caitlyn is dy–” 

He choked on the word. Halt had contemplated his sister’s death too many times—she’d been a sickly child since birth. But contemplating something and seeing it in his immediate future were very different things. 

Cait was—well, she was  _ Cait,  _ full of the kindness that the rest of their family lacked, witty and gentle and everything in between. She was the binding that held their awful pages together in one coherent book of a family. Her death would rip it to shreds.

Halt couldn’t stand by and do nothing while his little sister fought for her life. “I’m going out,” he said, and without waiting for a response, he was running. 

Back to his room to grab his cloak.

Through the grand hall of Dun Kilty, out the doors, across the drawbridge.

Past the town, the market square, the guardpost.

He plunged into the woods, feet instinctively finding the right trail. He’d followed it dozens, hundreds of times, knew where the low-hanging branches were, the roots that reached from the ground to trip him. He knew them at a subconscious level, and the woods recognized this. They welcomed him with open arms. 

Before he knew what he was doing, Halt burst out on the clifftop, breath scraping against his throat, legs aching, hands braced against his knees.

And Pritchard was there.

“Halt,” he said, and Halt didn’t question how Pritchard knew his name. Somehow, he thought, Pritchard would know everything. “I heard talk in the market. Your sister?”

Halt nodded, straightening up again, chest still heaving. “She’s—she’s—it’s not good.”

“I’m sorry,” said Pritchard. Two words so often parroted that they lost meaning—but not from him. Pritchard made everything sound sincere, every word an oath he’d keep with his dying breath.

“Cait might be dying,” Halt said, and the sentence seemed to hang in the air. Irreversible. There—he’d said it, and there was no way to rewind the world and take it back. “She’s been slipping away since the day she was born—I can feel it, and nothing is helping—least of all me—she could be dead  _ right now _ , and I wouldn’t know.”

Pritchard put a hand on his arm, slowly, as if trying not to startle a spooked animal. “Halt,” he said softly. “Before I became—my current profession—I trained as an herbalist.”

Halt’s heart jolted in his chest. “What?”

“An herbalist.” Pritchard reached into his cloak. “So when I heard, I gathered these herbs.” 

He pressed a bundle into Halt’s hand. It was tied in rough cloth, about the size of his palm. Halt stared down at it, hardly daring to breathe. “These—could save her?”

Pritchard nodded. “I think so. Tell your physician to grind them up and mix the paste with willow bark infusion.”

“Thank you,” he croaked, a gossamer strand of hope, thin as spider silk, warming his chest. Cait had a chance. Pritchard had given them all a chance. “How can I possibly—how can I repay you?”

“A favor,” said Pritchard. “Of the gravest importance. An issue of life and death, if you will.” His voice lowered conspiratorily, and Halt found himself leaning in. 

“Does your cook—” his gray eyes twinkled—“know how to make mulberry pie?”

“What?” Halt did a double take, his back straightening. Had he misheard somehow?

“A mulberry pie.” Pritchard smiled. “I’m a man on the run, living off the land, Your Highness. I miss the comforts of the table.”

“I… suppose,” Halt said, making a note to run down to the kitchens. “When would you like it?”

“Say, tomorrow at noon.” Pritchard nodded at him. “But you’d better head back now, if you want to make it to the castle before sunset.”

Halt blinked, realizing the sky was streaked with dull purple like a fading bruise. “You’re right, I’d better,” he said. “I—thank you again–”

“Everything will be okay, Halt.” Pritchard lifted a hand. “Travel safe.”

“Thank you,” he repeated breathlessly. And then, herbs clutched in hand like they were gold, Halt set off again for Dun Kilty. 

In the pre-dawn hours, when the light filtering through the cracks of the window carried a suggestion of blue-silver, Caitlyn coughed aloud. The fluttery sound cut through the utter stillness in her dark bedroom. 

Halt, dozing at her bedside, sat bolt upright in his seat. His neck and back protested at the violent motion, but he didn’t care. “Cait?”

“Halt?” Her voice rasped in her throat, but as Halt leaned over her, he could tell the fever had broken. 

“Caitlyn,” he breathed. His muscles sagged with relief as he took her small hand in his. “You’re okay. It’s going to be okay.” 

Halt met Pritchard at noon, an oven-warm pie tucked into his cloak.

Pritchard cut a slice with his dagger, offering it to Halt before taking a piece for himself. “Delicious,” he said, wiping his fingers on his cloak. “Nearly as good as this young cook I knew back in Araluen—nearly. I doubt anyone is better than Chubb.”

Halt only nodded, busy shoveling pie into his mouth with tacky fingers. The filling was tart, brown crust buttered and flaky, and he’d only had a few hurried mouthfuls of food yesterday. Pritchard, watching him, raised an eyebrow and cut another slice of pie. “Boys and their appetites,” he said, shaking his head.

“Thanks,” Halt said around a mouthful before diving in again. 

Only a sprinkling of lone crumbs remained in the tin before either of them broke the silence again. “Say,” said Pritchard, leaning back with a belch, “I hope this isn’t too presumptuous of me, but I needed something else.”

“You saved my sister’s life,” Halt said. The image of his hand holding Caitlyn’s bloomed behind his eyes, ink droplets in water. “Name it, and I’ll give it.”

“That integrity is admirable.” Pritchard’s head tilted slightly, and Halt suddenly felt as if his gray eyes were stripping him bare. “Well. I was making new arrows the other day when it occurred to me that I’d need feathers for fletching.”

“The game warden usually has geese,” said Halt. “Would that work?”

“Very much so. But in return–”

“You don’t have to do anything in return,” Halt said quickly. “I’m the one in your debt.”

Pritchard made an exasperated gesture. “I don’t care about debt. I’d like to teach you something. If you think the scales are uneven, take it as a gift. From exile to prince.”

Halt opened his mouth to protest again, but his court-bred politeness was overshadowed by the same intense curiosity. Pritchard had mentioned Crowley, his other apprentice—was he about to teach Halt some of the same things?

The hesitation was enough. “That’s what I thought,” Pritchard said. He pointed to Halt’s belt. “You’ve got a pretty dagger there—know how to use it?”

“A little,” he responded, touching the hilt at his waist. “But–”

It was faster than loch ice cracking in spring. Faster than a falcon in flight. Pritchard moved, and there was a glint of something spinning from his hand through the air—

A knife thudded into a tree trunk twenty meters away.

“Know how to do that?” Pritchard asked calmly.

Halt stared in shock at the dagger, buried blade-deep in the wood, hilt still quivering. He became aware that his mouth was hanging open, and he closed his jaw with an audible  _ click.  _

“Teach me,” he said. 

<>-<>-<>

There were more things after the goose feathers: a warm blanket for Pritchard’s horse, canvas cloth to repair his tent. Halt was happy to provide them. In return, Pritchard taught Halt how to identify tracks. How to move silently and invisibly. How to throw a punch—and a knife.

Two years later, he saved Halt’s life, when his right leg and his heart were broken by his twin brother’s betrayal. “Take care of yourself,” he said, steady hands immobilizing the break. “Don’t get in too deep.” 

(Just after that, he tried to save the queen, wasting away from fever and chills. She was beyond help. Halt invited him to the funeral.)

Later in life, Halt would not look back on Hibernia with any particular fondness. He remembered a drafty stone castle, mildewed books in the library, Ferris’s too-polite smiles. 

But the bright parts of his childhood were all Pritchard. They were pies and arrow fletchings, days spent tracking in the woods, throwing knives thudding home.

(Who was Pritchard to Halt? An exile, a stranger on the cliff. Deep, booming laughter. Smile lines around the eyes. Callused hands, cracked and dry in winter—Halt gave him a pair of gloves for Yule—but always steady on the reins.)

One of the last times Halt saw his mentor was on a rainswept night. His hair was plastered to his face, the wool of his cloak completely saturated. Mud spattered his boots as he ran through the woods to Pritchard’s cabin, stumbling along the trail in the half-dark. 

His mentor was waiting outside, looking serenely through the storm. “You made a decision.”

“I have to leave Clonmel,” Halt said softly. “If I stay, Ferris will kill me.” He touched his left shoulder, blue and black under his cloak from the butt end of an oar. It ached every time he moved, but any physical hurt was overshadowed by one deep in his soul.

“The second option remains,” murmured Pritchard. “Make it look like an accident. Let the better brother live on.”

“Assassination wouldn’t make me the better brother.” Halt looked down at his feet. “He can have the fucking throne. I’ll be far away from here.”

“Oh, Halt.” Pritchard touched his arm gently, and then as if on impulse wrapped him in a very wet hug. Halt buried his face in his mentor’s shoulder. His cloak smelled like woodsmoke and falling rain. 

They stood like that for a time, a moment that simultaneously seemed to stretch on and on to eternity and squeeze itself into one heartbeat.

Halt was the one who pulled away. He wiped the water from his face—  
(Rain, or tears? He wasn’t sure.)

—and said, “I won’t forget you. Ever.”

Pritchard smiled at him. “I have one more gift for you, to make that a little easier.” He reached into his cloak and pulled out a charm. Halt recognized it as an oakleaf—the symbol of the mysterious Ranger Corps, to which his mentor had belonged before exile. “I want you to have this. You’ve earned it over and over.”

He stared at it, glinting silver through the rain. “I–”

“In Araluen, you would’ve had a ceremony. A proper graduation.” His mentor shrugged sadly. “I can’t give you that, but I can give you my oakleaf, at least.”

“Won’t you miss it?” Halt asked.

“You’ll have greater need of it,” said Pritchard. “The silver oakleaf carries status, history, heroism. To accept it means respect—and responsibility.” He pressed it into Halt’s palm. The metal was cold against his skin. “Wear it well.”

“Thank you. So much.” The words were inadequate, four syllables to encompass three years of training, support, and friendship, to represent a father found. But perhaps no words could describe such a thing. Perhaps there lay the limits of human communication. “I’ll make you proud.”

Pritchard smiled at him. “You already have, Halt. You already have.”

When Halt left, he was still standing in the rain, head bowed against the wind.

And so went the story of his first family found—his father.


End file.
